Statistics about the devastating impact of the HIV virus on the African continent, where more than 23.5 million people are infected (Poku, 2001), are widely known, and are bandied about in both social and academic speak. Within mainstream biomedicine (biomedicine dominates research and regulation of the epidemic, and permeates popular understanding), the spread of AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa remains relatively unproblematised, with biological and behavioural models of aetiology remaining uncontested (Crewe, 1997).